Born in the former Rhodesia, Denise Scott Brown grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a progressive and liberal family. However, she would never forget witnessing the domination of the white elite during her childhood, and their disdain for local and vernacular culture. D. Scott Brown took up a place to study architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg before joining the prestigious Architectural Association in London, from where she graduated in 1954 with her design for miners’ housing.

Her interest in social issues led her to encounter the British architect couple Alison (1928–1993) and Peter Smithson (1923–2003). Like her, the emerging consumer society fascinated them, as did advertising and the “culture of the poor” as investigated by sociologist Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy. Next, D. Scott Brown moved from London to the USA, where at the end of the 1950s she began studies at the University of Pennsylvania that combined urban planning with a social sciences approach. There, she would meet the celebrated architect Louis Kahn (1901–1974) and his assistant, Robert Venturi (1925–2018). R. Venturi soon became her partner both in work and life.

D. Scott Brown pursued her professional trajectory to California in 1965, taking up a position teaching urban planning, first at Berkeley and then in Los Angeles. It was here that she discovered Las Vegas, a city that gather everything architects then hated: urban disorder, a spirit of mercantilism and the city’s enormous neon signs with their flashy vulgarity. With R. Venturi she began work on a book, Learning from Las Vegas, which was published in 1972. A somewhat controversial manifesto, its authors praise suburban American culture and condemn European trends of modernist architecture and urban planning. D. Scott Brown proved to be an exceptional polemicist and an inspired photographer, berating architectural elitism while sublimating the ugliness of the roadside commercial landscape.

From the late 1960s and for almost half a century D. Scott Brown worked in Philadelphia as an architect and urban planner alongside R. Venturi. As her reputation increased, her desire to denounce the machismo of her professional milieu did not wane, as evidenced in an emphatic essay from 1975, “Sexism and the Star System in Architecture”. Perhaps she paid for this outspokenness when the Pritzker Prize was awarded to Robert Venturi in 1991 – but not to her. An inseparable team, the two architects conceived a multitude of projects across the USA (including numerous university buildings), in Europe (such as the National Gallery extension in London) and in Japan, and are today considered, albeit with some reluctance, to be major figures of architectural postmodernism – though they prefer to see themselves as mannerists. What is indisputable is that D. Scott Brown, as an artist and as an intellectual, has left an enduring mark on the latter half of the 20th century, making space for pluralism and inclusivity in contemporary architecture.